My working assumption here is unusual: that our current well-established theories already give us most of what's needed to explain the foundations of physics. These theories don’t seem fundamental, because we haven’t clearly understood what it takes to make a universe like this work. Specifically, I ask how it’s possible for a system of interactions to make any information about itself measurable and communicable, or even definable. Clearly our universe has this sort of functionality, though we take it for granted. Yet there are strong arguments that only a quite complex and finely-tuned physics could accomplish this. The question then is how a self-determining system like the physics of our universe could have come to exist. I sketch out one conceivable scenario, as a sequence of emergent levels, to show that it’s possible to address this question empirically, on the basis of current theory.
Conrad Dale Johnson